“Loneliness eats away at you,” writes the author. “Solitude fills and fills you.” A captivating and revelatory memoir.
A writer’s life is conveyed through “a lens of penetrating inquiry.”
As a young girl studying the Baltimore Catechism to prepare for her first confession, Hampl (The Florist’s Daughter, 2007, etc.) was shocked to learn that daydreaming—“this effortless flight of the mind”—was a sin. She refused to believe it: daydreaming, her abiding pleasure, “sees things. Claims things, twirls them around, takes a good look,” and makes sense of them. In this lucent, tender, and wise memoir, the author celebrates this quiet reflection, which actually requires acute observation and intense, even loving, attention. “Caress the detail, the divine detail,” Nabokov commanded. “And because the detail is divine,” Hampl discovers, “if you caress it into life, the world lost or ignored, the world ruined or devalued, comes to life.” As in her previous memoirs, the author reports on journeys, both inward among memories and outward—to France, Wales, and on the Mississippi River—as she works at “the job of being human.” She is never really alone, “even though being alone is the one thing we recognize as our chance for authenticity, for surprising ourselves out of predictability.” Her traveling companions include Whitman, Dickinson, Augustine, Gregor Mendel, Colette, Virginia Woolf, and, notably, Montaigne, the elegant 16th-century writer who withdrew from public life “to muse about how to die—or was it how to live?” Montaigne invented a new literary genre, the essay, liberating writing “to be wild, untamed, eccentric.” His goal, Hampl writes, “was to renew the springs of the first-person voice bounding across the field of what we keep calling, against our uncertainty, reality.” His goal is Hampl’s, as well: memoir, she knows, is “not a reminiscence, but a quest.” Although reveling in solitude, the author is no stranger to loneliness; her husband’s recent, unexpected death has left her bereft. Grief pulses through the memoir, a feeling different, entirely, from “the solitude within the mind.”
“Loneliness eats away at you,” writes the author. “Solitude fills and fills you.” A captivating and revelatory memoir.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42964-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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